Talking cars? It may happen soon if government officials have their way. According to an AP story, the government said equipped cars might see a deadly crash coming even if the driver doesn't. Officials are moving to require automakers to equip new vehicles with technology that lets them warn each other when they're plunging toward peril.

The action, still a couple of years off, has "game-changing potential" to cut crashes, deaths and injuries, officials said Monday.

A radio beacon would continually transmit a vehicle's position, heading, speed and other information. Cars would receive the same information back from other vehicles, and a vehicle's computer would alert the driver to an impending collision. Some systems may...

It's all part of the government agenda to "dumb down" and control society. It worked for Mr. Hitler...the more the government controls the less freedom we have. Cars are a big part of the Info Tech and security tracking of individuals. Is anyone paying attention?

JOHNJOEYJOE writes: I'm just going to stick to the old cars. The government wants something or someone to control every facet of our lives.______This is just silly. The more intelligent our cars are, the safer we are. The kind of information that the cars will exchange will be of little if any use to the government but that information may save your life. There are limits to our ability to respond to sudden dangers and cars that can monitor their surroundings and talk to other cars will avoid those situations. Intelligent cars will take a huge bite out of the 30K dead we have each year and the billions of dollars lost in property and hospital care for the injured.

It should be noted that these systems will only override driver input if that input would lead to an accident. Otherwise your car will drive exactly as a dumb car.

With so much to gain, it's unfortunate that so many can only see a negative side that probably doesn't exist.

How can they say would prevent 80% of the crashes many of the cars on roads wouldn't have this technology for many years and how do you get wildlife to wear one of these units. People just need to pay attention and learn to drive.

So it would say, Stop you moron don't see that other car, and other car have same message. So in practice every car would get a message at every occurrence of coming onto another car??? This would drive me CRAZY!!! So I say HE'LL NO to this stupid idea!!!

lori: Let's see... there once was a large country, it was the top of the world. And it felt secure enough to become a bit arrogant in the eyes of other countries. And one day, there was an unexpected attack on said country. Suddenly, the people all were thrilled to give up their rights for fake promises of security. And the rest, as they say, is history.

"Talking cars? It may happen soon if government officials have their way." What ever happend to a country governed by the people and for the people?So, what people are asking for the government (Big Brother) to watch our every single move we make?Also "...vehicle-to-vehicle communications could prevent up to 80 percent of accidents that don't involve drunken drivers or mechanical failure." Isn't it the drunk drivers that we would want car communication to protect us from an accident if we chose to have Big Brother take over our cars?

do not need more tech. in cars. cost to much, and you know the car companies will always pass the cost and more on to us. i do not want my car talking to other cars, what control will the other car have over yours???

@ WZ: Nah. From what I have read and know before, the established high-speed distance between cars was based on the drivers' reaction time. The idea of computers keeping the distance was to keep cars safely closer together at high-speeds and therefore put more cars on the road without congestion 'because' computers can reaction far more quickly than human drivers.

How many vehicles could it track simultaneously? What about privacy issues regarding the data? Would this system be used in a court to determine guilt or innocence? What about the insurance companies using this data to determine fault? Who has access to the data? There are a lot of questions about this besides the above mentioned benefits.

If the cars are talking to each other, including location, speed and direction, then the government can listen in and issue tickets accordingly.

As for automatic braking, sometimes the way to avoid that collision is to accelerate and get out of the way. The picture shows a range of about 5 feet. The real range will need to be about 100 yards to prevent high-speed collisions, which means isolating an individual vehicle from dozens within range. Then who decides which car stops (or slows down) and which continues or accelerates?

mine already does . . . horn, screeching tires, loud mouth, etc; however, I do not drive distracted and rarely need to use my warning systems. I see the advantage for many others though and some day for me to